A general question, I'm still not very experienced with the Slackware Updates Mechanism and was wondering if you have the possibility to rollback - one step - the updates.

In this particular case I got curl-7.58.0 upgraded with slackpkg upgrade-all and I'm experiencing some peculiar timeout issues in a load balancing connectivity scenario - curl 7.58.0 apparently disconnects/times out much often that the 7.57.0 version.
On a brief look I couldn't identify anything that can explain my experience with the new curl 7.58.0 in its changelog:
https://curl.haxx.se/changes.html

I'd be thankful if someone could point me to a way to rollback the update or to a repository where I can download the older curl-7.57.0

P.S. I still have an 1 month old full SDCard image that I can use, but there were many changes I did on this system and I'm looking for an easier way to get back the old curl.

Off the top of my head I'd suggest SlackBuilds. If you find curl-7.57.0 Slackware package then:

If you're not opposed to building the package from source then a quick search on Google is what you need to do. I did just that and found curl 7.57.0 instantly... https://github.com/curl/curl/releases

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Thanks for your hints!
I just restored the old SD Card image and applied the config changes, it only took me around 20 minutes.

I consider my request for a repository where I can find the old curl package a little bit absurd now, given the way how the updates system on Slackware works, but I hoped such a "hidden" storage might be available for/at the maintainers.

I guess I need to follow two strict approaches with my updates "obsession" on ARM, first, be more conservative for the stable release, focus only on the security updates and secondly, find a way to hack slackpkg and keep the packages that it downloads-installs-deletes preserved and do some manual housekeeping on them to only store the previous version packages. The last approach will use some tens of MB for the stable Slack and maybe some hundreds MB for the -current, plenty of space for them on a modern SD Card.

I'm trying to be very careful with what I'm doing on ARM, mainly because the processing power is pretty low and any compilation takes a lot of time. There is no usable cross-compiler and I haven't had time yet to study and play with drmozes' build wonder machine...

As for the last curl, I won't consider it buggy, but in my (deliberately designed) very weird networking scenario it gets apparently confused.

Initially, if you're going to use slackpkg to save time or effort and install all packages in an 'apt-get install -y' fashion, you're not going to learn much. Except how to run 'slackpkg upgrade-all' command.

Slackpkg is a great tool. It has many command options, which are wasted on users who only use it for 'slackpkg upgrade-all'. I strongly suggest you have a very good read of the slackpkg man pages. Educate yourself on how to use it properly.

You do not want to hack slackpkg at all! You might want to use the 'slackpkg download' command. It's ALL in the man pages if you care to read it!

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What's apt-get ?

Thanks for the tip! Actually I did it the other day (man) and missed the download action, as it doesn't appear in the general usage first section but only 1-2 page(s) down (almost tl;dr). I used the word hacking in a general sense, focusing more on the update mechanism, because that's slackpkg purpose finally, to update, but then I'm not an English native speaker

You'll learn about what 'apt-get' is after you Google for information on it.

As for the slackpkg man pages, you might find that with Slackware [ARM] not all things are spelled out for you or shown to you in a way that you can copy and paste your way to success. Slackware can give you the most in-depth education in Linux you'll ever experience, IF you are willing to accept and act on it. A lot of Linux users (including Slackers) skip over things, or take the easy route, and learn very little. I'm not saying every Slackware user should take the time to learn and experience everything about the Slackware operating system, but I am saying that a great multitude of Slackware issues/problems can be avoided by reading instructions thoroughly or learning about what they're doing prior to doing it.

One word; EXPERIMENTING
On ARM devices, where you're using a SD card to run the OS, you can make an image of the SD card (i.e. backing up the entire Slackware ARM OS into one .img file) and then let your curiosity run rampant. If you should seriously screw your Slackware ARM system by experimenting and testing, you can easily re-write the OS (.img file) to your SD card and start over. I have done this more times than I care to recall. Most people would cringe and weep at the thought of wrecking their sexy Slackware ARM system but I have learned a great deal from all my errors and mistakes, intentional or otherwise. When my Slackware ARM system is FUBAR, because of something I've done, it's an opportunity to learn and never a tragedy.

Let me save you some time and effort. Although it's better if you find out these things for yourself.

This is NOT a listed command [option] in the slackpkg man pages but, as I advised previously, if you read the man pages thoroughly, and play around with slackpkg a little, you'll start to learn things and make less errors of judgement and/or incorrect assumptions.

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I guess I have enough experience with Slackware x86 and some of your hints for the ARM port I'm already doing (SD Card backup images for instance), maybe you didn't pay attention to my posts - also the discussions with drmozes - with respect to the updates inconsistencies. The issue is that I'm only experiencing these issues with slackpkg on Slackware ARM and due to that & some other limitations I'm already with one foot in another boat, deeply sorry for that.
On your other paragraphs/ideas - I just thought Slackware is about KISS, hope I'm not wrong...

If that's what Slackware is about for you then that's what it's about.

Slackware philosophy has nothing to do with how you should use Slackware or learn how to use it. The philosophy behind the distribution describes what you can expect to find in Slackware and a little about how/why it was designed this way. It's a truly great concept and works exceptionally well.

An excerpt from the above page reads; "The Slackware community generally emphasizes user empowerment by learning and understanding the system rather than blindly copying instructions, a trend common in commercial proprietary operating systems."

Food for thought indeed! lol

It's not about me, it's about Slackware, the first sentence in the link you provided.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
Now, I know already you like to write and assume/presume/fabulate a lot and I enjoy chatting with you, honestly, but this thread subject was about a particular package, it's resolved, you provided me a good hint about the download slackpkg action and I'm thankful for that. The inconsistencies in the slackpkg behavior on Slack ARM, are discussed and detailed in other threads and still have no real explanation/resolution.

Should you want to philosophize more I can give you an E-Mail Address and we'll do it privately, I'm always happy to have a native English pen pal, helping me to sharpen my English skills. And I do love those chocolate biscuits BTW, I spent almost one year in the UK and got addicted to them (fat too) and to the cranberries juice, so we'll always have a common subject to start with...

/unsubscribed

My most sincere apologies. I assumed you wanted to learn something about Slackware. Sorry to waste your time.

That KISS principle does apply. The slackpkg tool downloads and upgrades packages, it's simple and does what it says on the tin.

It will downgrade a package for you but that's better thought of as upgrading to an older version - one that *you* have kept a copy of.

Slackpkg does not manage a local repo for you, that's a different task and so logically you would want a different tool for that.

A simple way of doing this would be to create with wget or rsync a local mirror of your own, if you omit adding --delete to rsync for example it will download new packages without deleting the old and so create a directory structure with every version of the packages from the time you started doing so.

Note that this would however be a bad thing to use as your source media on first install as it would install and upgrade through every version you have present there.

Alternatively you could use something like btrfs and snapshots to create a mirror you can roll back and forward, as you can see though we are leaving the land of simple

So slackpkg simply downloads and upgrades packages, anything else you add yourself depending on your need.

PS.

By luck rather than design I have curl-7.57.0-arm-1_slack14.2.txz{,.asc} here but at 1.2MB it's too big to attach Let me know if you still need it ( and how to get it to you )

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Exactly. No other Linux distribution makes it as easy to build packages as Slackware does. Simplicity is the key.

If it's the -current version of the package you require then there can't be a much easier way than this:

http://sarpi.co.uk/files/extra/n/curl-7.57.0-arm-1.txt
http://sarpi.co.uk/files/extra/n/curl-7.57.0-arm-1.txz
http://sarpi.co.uk/files/extra/n/cur...-arm-1.txz.asc

NB: these files are there temporarily for you to download if you need them. They will be removed in 12 hours or so.

slackpkg has been removed from -current on ARM, as I also found it inconsistent and had unexpected results.
I've started taking snapshots of the ARM -current so that I can install an older copy from scratch, and get slackpkg to update against it in sequence once I have some time. It may then be possible to figure out what's up with it.

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Removed!